RISING, Melbourne’s rapturous winter festival of new art, music and performance, today unveils its 2025 program featuring; 65 events, 327 artists, 15 new commissions, 9 world premieres, 5 Australian and 10 Victorian, returning to showcase the city in all its moon-lit glory over two epic weekends from Wednesday 4th to Sunday 15th June.
Over 12 nights, RISING transforms the CBD into a pulsating playground of music, theatre and dance and public performances. Take a swing at mini golf reimagined as art, lose yourself in a storm of kinetic lasers, groove to Punjabi beats at Fed Square or compete in the ultimate challenge of doing literally nothing.
Continuing RISING’s legacy of unlocking hidden corners of the city, the expansive 2025 program will spill into laneways, arcades, underground basements and grand theatres showcasing an unmissable lineup of world class international and local artists, in a city-wide celebration of Naarm, now.
THEATRE DANCE & PERFORMANCE
RISING’s theatre, dance, and performance program brings bold reimaginings, genre-defying spectacles, and deeply personal works to the stage: challenging, electrifying, and immersive.
Argentine choreographer Marina Otero smashes the boundaries between art and life in Kill Me, a raw performance that unravels the artist with fearless honesty and theatrical mayhem. Premiering in Melbourne at The Sumner, Melbourne Theatre Company, mental health, mortality, and artistic survival all collide in a spectacle that swings between grand dance sequences and moments of aching vulnerability. Part of her ongoing Remember to Live series – a lifelong commitment to documenting her own existence through performance – Kill Me is both deeply personal and wildly unpredictable.
Shakespeare’s timeless tales get a playful, kitchen-table makeover in Complete Works: Tabletop Shakespeare, where six performers condense most of his plays using nothing but wit, imagination, and household objects. A vase becomes a prince, a jar transforms into Juliet, and a bottle of Dettol stands in for the nurse. Covering 36 of Shakespeare’s works over nine days and nights of the festival, a new story unfolds, proving that the heart of Shakespeare’s work isn’t in grand sets or elaborate costumes but in the sheer power of storytelling. Created by the acclaimed experimental theatre company Forced Entertainment and presented at the University of Melbourne Arts and Culture’s Guild Theatre, this inventive retelling strips Shakespeare down as you’ve never seen it before
Check into Heartbreak Hotel, a hilariously offbeat exploration of heartbreak by acclaimed Aotearoa New Zealand company EBKM. Dressed in lavender tassels and backed by the ultimate breakup soundtrack, think Elvis, Celine, and the greats, Karin McCracken guides us through the messy, absurd, and all-too-relatable aftermath of a serious split. Alongside the virtuosic Simon Leary, who morphs into every ex, Karin dives into famous novels, scientific studies, Berlin nightclubs, and even the depths of her own cells in an attempt to clinically dissect heartache. From the award-winning creative duo Eleanor Bishop and McCracken, this Edinburgh Fringe hit premiering at Arts Centre Melbourne is a love letter to the lovesick and a balm for the bruised.
Direct from the West End – BLKDOG – London-born Botis Seva’s Olivier Award-winning hip hop masterpiece arrives in Melbourne for the first time at Arts Centre Melbourne, ready to take audiences on a wild and transformative ride. With a pounding score by longtime collaborator Torben Lars, a squadron of seven dancers, cloaked in hooded caps, immerse the audience in a hallucinatory journey marked by violence and an unsettling, dead-eyed fascination.
In another Shakespearean remake, catch the dazzling reimagining of Hamlet, as a neurodiverse cast brings fresh energy to Shakespeare’s iconic tragedy, turning “to be or not to be?” into a life-affirming question. Featuring eight performers with Down Syndrome, this vibrant adaptation from Peruvian theatre company Teatro La Plaza joyously deconstructs the prince’s existential struggle. Presented at the University of Melbourne’s Union Theatre, see the performers bring their own frustrations, desires, and perspectives to the stage, delivering Hamlet’s iconic soliloquy all at once in a rap, adding a contemporary twist to the age-old words. Melding live performance with film, Hamlet turns the question of madness back on itself, inviting the audience to reflect on how society defines normality.
Moving across town to a new RISING venue Buxton Contemporary, get ready to lose yourself in the pleasure and pain of a 3-day rave, condensed into one electrifying hour. The Butterfly Who Flew into the Rave is a dance work created by New Zealand-Aotearoa’s club legends Oli Mathiesen, Lucy Lynch, and Sharvon Mortimer taking you deep into the underground, as the trio brings club styles to life in a relentless, candy-fueled spectacle
As the bass drops and the lights flicker, you’ll be transported into an LED-lit world where dance and euphoria blur together in one transcendent experience. This isn’t just a dance performance; it’s a high-energy celebration of music, movement, and the transcendent power of collective joy.
The cult-favourite rock musical, known for its boundary-pushing storytelling and glam-punk attitude, Hedwig and The Angry Inch, will make its return in a bold new Australian production at RISING, bringing the raw, glitter-soaked energy of the original to The Athenaeum Theatre. Filipino-Australian singer Seann Miley Moore, discovered on The Voice, takes on the iconic role as a “slip of a girly boy” Berliner who goes to marry an American soldier but ends up abandoned in Kansas, on the cusp of another doomed romance. Torn between an idealistic vision of love and the urge to burn it all down. Hedwig is poised with a battered mic and a rhythm section full of Korean-born military wives, ready to test the limits of self-creation.
Stephanie Lake Company’s The Chronicles is a sweeping meditation on time, change, and collective resilience, brought to life through a fusion of dance, choral music, and electrifying soundscapes. Premiering in Victoria for RISING at Arts Centre Melbourne, Lake’s new work comes home to Melbourne after receiving rave reviews during its Sydney Festival run in January.
With 12 dancers embodying the fluid passage of time, their movements are intertwined with the celestial voices of The Yarra Voices Children’s Choir and the resonant baritone of Oliver Mann. Long time collaborator Robin Fox’s electro-acoustic composition pulses beneath it all, propelling the work forward with both urgency and grace. As the final installment in Lake’s triptych of large-scale works – following Colossus (MIAF, 2019) and Manifesto (RISING, 2022) – The Chronicles offers a deeply moving exploration of transformation, blending precision, power, and poetic beauty into an immersive, communal experience.
Also coming to Arts Centre Melbourne is the innovative live docu-drama POV involving fourteen unrehearsed actors and one camera-wielding kid. Created by artist Malcolm Whittaker and performance collective re:group performance collective, the story is centred around Bub, an 11-year-old girl obsessed with documentary filmmaking and on a mission to understand her fractured family. Each night, two new unrehearsed actors play the parents, while Bub (played with precocious verve by Edith Whitehead or Mabelle Rose) directs the action. The script is playful, heartfelt and funny but the picture shifts with the whims of human impulse as actors respond live and unprepared.
For a dance work with a more intimate lean, head to Chunky Move for The Act by choreographer and dancer Amrita Hepi and sex worker and writer Tilly Lawless. The new work explores the intersections of dance and sex work, examining the body as a vessel for both professional service and personal expression, challenging conventional perceptions of labour, authenticity, and representation. Framed by Daniel Janatch’s baroque sound design and directed by Mish Grigor, each performer speaks and moves within charged ambiguities – the body as a vehicle for desire and for expression.
Pigeons is a thrilling, chaotic collision of music, technology, and performance, where percussionists face off against mechanical forces in an explosive battle of sound and survival at Melbourne Recital Centre. Created by the audacious Speak Percussion, three robotic trap machines take centre stage hurling hundreds of fluorescent clay targets at a wall of suspended, resonant percussive objects. The musicians duck, flap, glide and slide among the projectiles, in a frantic search for safety while glorious music rings out. It’s percussionist vs pigeon, human vs machine.
LEGENDS (of the Golden Arches) is a bold and witty two-hander that takes us on a bogus adventure through the Golden Arches and into Chinese hell. Co created by emerging playwrights Joe Paradise Lui and Merlynn Tong, the Lawler Theatre will play host to this heart-filled buddy comedy that bends reality and serves extra pickles.
Across the city at Arts House in North Melbourne, acclaimed dancer Joel Bray premieres his latest major dance work Monolith. Muscular and sinewy, five fierce Brown women present themselves as an obstacle and as resistance- they are a monolith, an enormous ancient rock formation, coming together and apart. Sitting strong in the landscape, defying waves of colonisation, urbanisation and deforestation. This is an undeniable new work from Wiradjuri artist Bray, who echoes and honours generations of protest and rebellion.
Mickey, the premiere work from Brooke Stamp, is a visceral plunge into the subconscious of a dancer, where movement becomes an unfiltered expression of raw impulse. In this ever-evolving performance, Stamp transforms her rehearsal space – Buxton Contemporary – into a living, breathing entity exposing the hidden rituals and fleeting moments that typically remain unseen. Each show unfolds uniquely, shaped by the present moment, as the dancer navigates a fluid landscape of instinct, memory, and transformation.
Visionary playwright S. Shakthidharan returns to RISING with another story of hope, betrayal, tradition and self-discovery. His Sri Lankan Australian epic Counting and Cracking played to standing ovations at RISING 2024 and went on to triumphantly tour the UK and New York. Now the playwright brings us The Wrong Gods to Fairfax Theatre at Arts Centre Melbourne, a gripping mother-daughter character study that delves into the complexities of tradition, progress, and self-discovery.
Amplified: The Exquisite Rock and Rage of Chrissy Amphlett presented by UMAC is a high-voltage cabaret igniting the untamed legacy of the rebel queen of Australian rock. Led by the powerhouse performer Sheridan Harbridge (Prima Facie) and directed by the acclaimed Sarah Goodes (Julia), this electrifying production, taking place at University of Melbourne’s Union Theatre, plunges into the raw, unfiltered world of the Divinyls’ frontwoman.
June 4 – 15
